Read. Your search for employment will not end in ruins if you begin each day with a bit of the reading you haven’t been able to do for the past year because of your crazy jobs. It’s good for your mind and your peace of soul. (I’ve returned to history for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long. It’s especially lovely on rainy mornings).

Clean everything. Tidy. Rearrange flat. At last, you can get the place just as you want it! It’s not just that job-hunting feels more hopeful if you’re in pleasant surroundings; it’s that your home, like your work, is a gift. For most of us, housekeeping is something we try to cram into a Saturday morning, so it’s always rushed and depressing. For a little while, you can keep house the way we were meant to! This, too, is good for the soul.

Pray properly. No more squishing in your mental prayer in between ablutions and total collapse late at night! No more rushing through your Rosary on the train! These duties are never going away; this might be the only chance you have, for the rest of your life, to slow the pace, and to enter into them free of nagging, external pressures (believe me – mental prayer when you have to get up at 5am the next day is harder than mental prayer when you’re unemployed).

Cook with what you already have. And what you don’t have must come from the cheap end of the supermarket and cost you no more than four dollars. Surprise yourself with the discovery that you can actually invent simple-but-tasty dishes and are not entirely a useless takeaway-dependent inner-Sydney foodie who would be the first to starve in a post-nuclear-holocaust world or on a farm!

Rediscover the niceness of your friends. There’s nothing like having people reassuring you that things will be okay not only to offset the haunting fear of imminent homelessness. And the fact that they bother to be kind means you can’t pretend you’re all alone in the word, and downtrodden and miserable etc etc (this is really just a point for melancholics, I think!) So, maybe you can’t afford to go out, now. But you’ve just cleaned your home and made it bright-and-shiny new; there’s no better time have these friends over for afternoon tea! You can’t write job applications all day and you don’t want to live off charity (i.e. other people paying for lunch.) So, now is the right time to enjoy your home, your friends, and the pleasure of being hostess. Once you find a job, you’ll no longer be free to sit in the afternoon sun with tea and company.

Chop the lowest tier off a tiered skirt, thereby changing its character completely. Use the chopped-off bit as a scarf or for your hair. You can’t go shopping anymore; it’s sad, I know. But now you’ve just got yourself a new skirt, and the only skill you needed was the ability to use a pair of scissors!

Visit somebody else’s computer, and discover that yours is about ten years out of date. You might want to fix that – you know, because of how your next employer might reasonably expect you to be able to use something current.

Walk. You have to exercise. You can’t spend any money. And you can’t stare at a computer all day without going mad. So make sure you go for a walk, a least three times a week.

Sing. This is the only time in your entire life when singing three or four Masses a week isn’t going to leave you prone with exhaustion at the end of it. Enjoy it while you can.